Word: klees
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Morris Graves's queer-looking gouaches, disembodied pictures of weird, woebegone snakes and spindle-legged birds, were the show's No. 1 hit. Totally unlike anything hitherto dreamed of in U.S. art, they somewhat resembled the wiry expressionist fantasies of famed Swiss Painter Paul Klee (TIME, Oct. 21,1940). Hopping about an ornithological fairyland, or standing gravely among heaps of what looked like luminous spaghetti, Painter Graves's fossil-like birds were painted with the delicacy of Chinese landscapes...
...eucalyptus bark, done, not by Australia's high-brow artists, but by the paint-and-feather-clad, boomerang-throwing natives of the Australian bush. Showing animals, hunting scenes and spirits, these queer, childlike pictures were as unrealistic and imaginative as the screwball drawings of famed German Expressionist Paul Klee (TIME, Oct. 21). Some showed kangaroos and kookaburra birds drawn with their internal organs visible X-ray-wise through the skin. One, depicting a spirit, looked (see cut) like a child's conception of the late Jean Harlow carrying an umbrella and a fan. To paint them, Australia...
...this world of screwball art the most consistently screwy was Paul Klee's. An absolute individualist, whose work resembled nobody else's, Klee painted "animals of the soul, birds of the intellect, fish of the heart, plants of the dream...
...Modernist Architect Walter Gropius invited Klee to teach drawing at his famous Bauhaus technical art school in Weimar. In the middle '20s Parisian surrealists hailed him as a prophet. Frenchmen, usually supercilious toward German art, began collecting his infantile drawings. In 1931 Klee went on to be a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy. Meanwhile, U. S. modern-art connoisseurs bought his ectoplasmic scratchings at $750 a canvas...
Last week Manhattan's Buchholz and Willard Galleries gathered together the largest Klee exhibition ever placed on view. The 100-odd drawings and canvases in the exhibition. ranged from mad, wire-worky diagrams to basket-textured abstractions. Some, like the Twittering Machine, had an odd, disembodied relation to mechanical objects. Some looked like primitive drawings by U. S. Indians. Many were painted on coarse burlap, resembled intricate tattered rugs and tablecloths. All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before...